The present invention relates to technology for capturing and registering a face image and authenticating the identity of a user with the face image.
Counterterrorism and crime control in public facilities have increasingly become significant issues for years. For this reason, biometric authentication utilizing biometric information (such as finger prints, veins, and faces) has attracted attention; particularly, face authentication has got high expectations. Face authentication has superiority to the other biometric authentication in view of an advantage that the person to be identified does not need to do authentication operation because the face image can be captured from a distant place. Accordingly, wider application is expected, inclusive of major application to border security and security surveillance.
A face image-based personal authentication system preparatorily inputs and registers a face image of an individual user as dictionary information. For example, when a user is going to use a facility, the authentication system captures a face image of the user and compares the captured face image with the registered face image to determine whether the user is the identical person.
Such an existing authentication system requires the user to stop in front of the camera of the authentication system and look at the lens of the camera to have a face image captured when registering the face and verifying the face. Unconscious personal authentication that captures a face image without user's notice and reduces the variation in position or facial expression is difficult to achieve with the existing authentication system.
To address the above-described issue, Patent Literature 1 discloses a technique to correct the variation in position or expression by fitting three-dimensional measurement data of a face acquired from captured face images to a three-dimensional model prepared in advance.
Patent Literature 1: JP 2007-122454 A